The WaterWoman Prophecies
by NamuNamu
Summary: There is a being who sleeps beneath the waters of Hogwarts Lake, waiting for her true heart's own to come and wake her up. She is the WaterWoman, and her soulmate is... Guess!What does all this have to do with the power that the Dark Lord knows not, and w
1. Prologue

Under Hogwarts Lake, there is a deep grotto, and in that grotto there is a chamber, and even the merfolk will not go there. It is dark, and cold, and all of the merpeople seem to know a story of a friend of a friend who once wandered inside, and who never returned…

They know, of course, that the stories are nonsense. If a wizard were to hear the story—and a wizard did, once, though he has died now—he would probably think, and probably did think, that the grotto was the merfolk's equivalent of Hogsmeade's Shrieking Shack. Of course, there is a major difference: the Shack earned its name through horrible, horrible noises, and the grotto is… silent. Silent as the grave. Once, when a small mer-child swam too close to the entrance, hoping to hear something she could tell her friends about as proof that she'd dared to approach the cave, she swore she heard… _breathing_… but she had swum away far too fast to make sure it was anything but water flowing between the strange, beautiful rocks that lay scattered around the cave's entrance.

Had the child dared to venture even a step within the cave, she would have died. In this case, in deed, the old legends _are_ true, because the Grotto of the Fallen Pearls is a cursed place. The curse has laid long upon it, since well before the days of the founders. Even the ancestors' ancestors of the ancestors of the current merfolk elders could not have recalled the days before the cave lay, silent and still, a threatening presence deep within their kingdom. Even those ancestors' _ancestors_ could not recall the face of the woman who, with shuddering sighs, betrayed and abandoned, had turned herself into a Water Woman, and sunk beneath the surface of Hogwarts Lake to give birth to her first and only child.

The child, had she been born to a human mother, would have been one of the first witches to be conceived, born—and, probably, raised—in the grounds of Hogwarts Castle. She was a princess, a child of divine heritage—her mother was a descendant of Brigid, the Goddess of the Sacred Flames, and her father was a Celtic prince. But her mother was also a witch, and that fact was what made the girl's very existence into the stuff of prophecy.

There _was_ a prophecy, you see. In the time before the coming of the Great Evil upon the land, the wise women had sung of a time so far distant that even the descendants of the many-times-great-grandchildren of the wise women's own great grandchildren would not know of it. They knew that, in the days soon to come, there would be a Great Evil upon the land, and all the human inhabitants of what would one day become Hogwarts Castle would die. Their deaths would purge the evil, for a little time, and in that time the mighty ones, those who would be known as The Founders, would come upon the land and think it empty from the beginning, and they would build a castle, and call it Hogwarts. A school would be built there, and many young sorcerors would come from all the British Isles to hone their craft. But the land was tainted, besmirched by the curse of the Great Evil that would never, ever quite completely fade away, and there would still be in that school a smell of death and sorrow.

In that time, sang the wise woman, a hero would rise: a brave, orphaned youth, marked with the bolt of the lightning, and armed with the sword of his sorcerous ancestors. When the Great Evil arose once more—for the fourth time, or maybe even for the fifth—this hero would, with the help of his loyal companions, destroy it, and banish it forever from the earth. He was to be the reincarnated form of the Son of the Morning Light, and for a while after his victory, there would be peace.

(The peace would not be permanent, for the simple reason that peace _cannot_ be permanent, ever. There is always some conflict, or else the world may as well be dead.)

The wise women sang, however, that this hero should not triumph alone. Around him there would be many brave and true friends, and some of them would even seem first to be his enemies. Primary among them were three, or four, or five (depending upon which wise woman you were asking):

There was a young woman with mad hair, a woman so wise she could tell the young hero everything he needed to know, and she would be called The Wise One.

There would be a young man, who was descended from the Celtic chieftains, and his hair would be as red as the sunrise, and he would be called The Scarlet One.

There would be a maiden fresh as the morning, and brave as the hero himself, and her hair would be the same sun-red as the Scarlet One's, but she would have a part of the hero's heart for herself, forever. She was to be called, they said, The Rose.

There would be a spy, a troubled young man with hair as pale as spider-silk, and he would fall from favor but find his place again through his own valor and cleverness. He would be called the Silver Serpent, and he would win the hearts of the Wise One and the Scarlet One before they even realized their hearts were in danger. Such would be the charm, and the strangeness, of the Silver Serpent.

There was also to be a strange young man, called The Stumbling One, who would serve as the hero's foil and shadow throughout all his life. There was no clear knowledge of the final purpose of the Stumbling One, but the wise women agreed that he would have a serious part to play in the battles to follow.

When the battle finally rose in heat and ferocity, there would come a time when the forces of darkness seemed poised to win out over the Hero and his companions. There would be one, however, who would have the final power to ensure that the Dark One and his hordes were defeated.

Unfortunately, this One—who would be a beauty beyond all beautie, as wise as the Wise One and brave as the Rose, and who would come to love the Hero as woman never before loved man—she would at first be separated, insurmountably, by the boundaries of time.

It fell to the Hero and his friends to find a way to bring her to them, before their time of need became a time of death and mourning.

In the grotto beneath the dwellings of the Merfolk, the slow currents of the lake moved sluggishly through slime and silt, resting and swirling on pearls and diamonds and the remains of ruined carpets. It had been a fine dwelling, once, but when the Long-Ago Lady, the mother of the Water Woman, who had become a Water Woman herself and lived just long enough to raise her daughter to young-womanhood—when she had died, the fine and beautiful things in her dwelling had begun to crumble, and now the only things that remained fine and beautiful were the garments worn by the sleeping maiden in the center of the grotto. For much longer than a thousand years she had lain there, suspended in a piece of frozen time, and for many years more she would remain, eternally young and beautiful, unless some man (or woman) was able to one day wake her up.

She had hair the color of a moonlit sky, because all Water Women (more human and more beautiful than mermaids, and able to speak the Human Tongues and mermaid tongues alike without any difficulty) had tresses the colors of water, or of seaweed. This one's hair was like deep, cold ocean water, and glimmered like the surface of a lake under the moonlight. Though her eyes were closed, they seemed to twitch alertly as she slept. Were she awake, and were anyone in the grotto to look upon her, they would have seen that this maiden was fair beyond any human to live in many, many centuries, and that her eyes were the color of perfect golden amber. The pupils of those sleeping eyes were, too, like flecks in amber: reddish, instead of black, so that when the maiden was awake her eyes gave her a serpentine look that had always sent the merfolk scattering in the days when she was younger. She had skin the color of pale moonlight, and a curved red mouth with teeth that were pointed like a serpent's fangs. Because she was a Water Woman, this maiden could speak the language of the snakes—especially the dialect of the water snakes, and even more especially the water snakes peculiar to this very old and isolated Scottish lake. In fact, three water snakes lay in her chamber now, guarding her as she slept, though they were sleeping, too. They would wake up if anyone were to try and cross the door (and if anyone were able to make it into this small pocket of undisturbed time—which was, of course, far less likely than just a small merchild wandering into the grotto one day). If anyone ever did, this person would die immediately, unless they were the one the sea-serpents knew to wait for, the one who spoke their tongue as well as his own.

Until then, they waited, lying in coils around the body of their mistress: The Water-Woman, the Princess Alania Serenia Moonstone. As she slept, and slept, still waiting for her prince, her beautiful red mouth seemed to curve into a smile. The time, surely, must be coming closer now.

Nearby, the elders of the local tribe of merfolk suddenly all began to shiver.


	2. You're a WHAT!

At the wedding of Bill Weasley and Fleur Delacour, in the summer of 1997, Harry Potter was dancing with the groom's sister.

(This in itself would have been something for the gossip pages, if the press had been there, but fortunately Mad Eye Moody had taken it upon himself to make the perimeter impenetrable to the press. He and his fellow Aurors were wedding guests, of course, but most of them were the sort of people who got very, very nervous if they went too long without some kind of action.)

(This was, of course, with the exception of Auror Tonks, who had found a different sort of action for herself in the toolshed, assisted by one R. J. Lupin.)

Harry and Ginny had danced four dances now, and the music was winding down but neither of them felt like separating. Ginny—who was going by Ginevra, now, since she had almost reached her sixteenth birthday and was a grown woman by Pureblood standards—was wearing a yellow gown that made her red hair burn like Brigid's fire. Harry had not been able to take his eyes off her once during the ceremony, even though Fleur Delacour was said now to be the loveliest bride to have walked on English soul since the part-Veela Vodanska Putin had married into the Malfoy family a hundred years before. Ginny's eyes, he now noticed, seemed larger and darker, and her freckles—well, they were still there. Of course. They were a great part of Ginevra's beauty, her freckles. They were, he thought, quite the most attractive freckles he'd ever seen, on anyone (Ron had more, but Harry wasn't interested in men, not that he knew of yet anyway).

Ginevra was likewise captivated by Harry, because in the three weeks since he'd gone to the Dursleys for the last time he seemed to have hit another growth spurt. He was as tall as her now (before, he'd been a little shorter, because of having been malnourished at the Dursleys' throughout most of his childhood), and because he was so thin he seemed even taller. His skin was golden-brown, because he'd been working in the garden for most of the time he'd been at the Dursleys' (not even because they'd asked him to—they didn't ask him to do much of anything, anymore—but because it was better than spending all his time inside the house with only his relatives for company). Harry was wearing black dress robes, with a red-and-green design around the cuffs and down the front edges of the robe that, if you looked at them closely, turned out to be holly (leaves and berries). He looked very elegant, and not at all Christmassy, even with the holly. He had chosen it because his wand was holly, and in the books he had been reading when not in the Dursleys' garden, he had read that a wizard should try to develop as much of a connection as possible with his wand, because a wand will save your life even more certainly than a good sword will. (These were very old books, some of them from the time when wizards had only just started using wands at all. They had been in Sirius's house, and he had made Kreacher bring all the books from Grimmauld Place to Privet Drive the first weekend he had been there. It had been very useful, so far, and he thought he knew the first place to start looking for the next Horcrux.)

He had been letting his hair grow, since midway through the spring, and it had gotten long enough that now he had to tie it back. He wasn't sure why it had started growing all of a sudden, but instead of remaining a little too long (as it had for pretty much all his life at that point), it had suddenly started to grow very quickly, and had started getting straighter, too. If you hadn't known him before, you probably woudn't have looked at him and thought he was Harry Potter. He had also gotten contacts, and his green eyes glowed with suppressed emotion as he swung Ginny across the grass of the outdoor dance floor.

The next song began, and Harry and Ginevra kept dancing. People were starting to whisper, but neither of them seemed to care. Harry was telling himself that he wanted to talk to Ginny about important Order matters—he had been writing to Ron and Hermione for the last few weeks, but he hadn't managed to find the nerve to write to Ginny. This was partly because he was so sad over Dumbledore's death, and partly because he felt terrible for breaking up with her, and also partly because he secretly wanted to get back together with her but didn't know how to say so. When he had come to the Weasleys' house three days before, he and Ron and Hermione and Ginny had all been inducted into the Order of the Phoenix, and had sat in on their first Order meeting in the living room of the Burrow. Bill had been there, and Fleur, and Mr. and Mrs. Weasley. The twins were on a mission Dumbledore had given them before he'd died, and they had only arrived back at the Burrow in time for the wedding this morning. The meeting wasn't even very important, but Harry used it as an excuse to keep holding Ginny in his arms.

Suddenly she leaned forward, and Harry stiffened, a little, thinking she was about to kiss him. Instead, she leaned close enough to whisper in his ear, and said, "I'm a Parselmouth, you know."

"You can't be," he said blankly, still a little disappointed that he hadn't been kissed. Then he realized what Ginevra had just said. "Wait—you're a _what?_"

"I'll show you after the dancing," said Ginevra. "It happened in my first year, when I was…" She hesitated, and Harry held her closer, remembering. In their first year as classmates—Harry's second year, Ginny's first—they had been brought together by fate and the machinations of Tom Riddle, who had possessed Ginny through an evil diary given to her by Mr. Malfoy. It had been a very traumatic experience, and both of them had almost died. "I've been wanting to tell you," Ginevra continued now, "but… it's hard to talk about, you know?"

"I know," said Harry, remembering some times he had wanted to tell her about, too, but hadn't been able to because the memories had been so painful. "How did it happen?"

"It was because I had to call the snake," she whispered. Harry looked around to make sure that no one else was close enough to hear what they were saying—because even if Ron and Hermione knew that he was a Parselmouth, and had accepted it, most people thought it was kind of freaky and he didn't want to ruin the wedding. Ginny must have felt the same way, because she leaned in even closer to him. Harry found himself blushing, even though she really wasn't doing anything bad. "I had to use my voice to say the things that—_he_… wanted me to say…" Harry hugged her, and Ginny gave a little sob. "It was awful, Harry, and I've wanted to tell you about it for so long. It felt like… It felt really bad."

"I know," Harry said, even though he really didn't. "Are you saying that you—somehow remembered, what he told you to say?"

"I remembered _all_ of it," said Ginny, "and I even remembered words he never even used. When it was over—the summer after my first year—I went out for a walk one day and sat down on a stone, out where we play Quidditch in the summer? And there was a serpent there, and I _heard_ it, Harry."

"What did it say?" Harry whispered.

"It said, _Stupid human, get off my rock_," Ginny said. Harry started to laugh, and then he looked around.

"Ginny, I think you spoke in Parseltongue," he whispered. Guests all over the dance floor had turned to look at them, all shocked and horrified, and all staring at Harry. He thought for a second, then said, "I'm sorry, all you lot. I was repeating a joke, and forgot what language I was speaking." Then he smiled, and Ginevra thought that Harry's smile must have gotten more charming over the summer. It wasn't her own opinion, either—everyone else seemed instantly pacified, and the party went back to normal.

"I'm sorry, Harry," said Ginny. Harry looked back at her, and saw that her eyes were brimming with unshed tears. "I think I'd like to go and sit down now, would you mind terribly?" Harry took Ginny by the arm and led her off the dance floor, then went and got some punch. They found a couple of folding chairs and carried them off far enough that no one else would hear them talking..

"Harry, I miss you," Ginny said when he sat down next to her. "I know you don't want to be distracted, and you don't want me to be in danger, but… I'm already in danger, Harry."

"I've been thinking about you all summer, Ginevra," said Harry. "I couldn't forget how beautiful you were, or how brave, or how—I know I don't deserve to ask it, Ginny, but can we get back together?" He waited, knowing she would reject him.

Ginevra grabbed Harry and kissed him, hard. "I love you, Harry Potter," she said. "I've been hoping you would say those words all summer, and I want you to know the answer is _yes_." She kissed him again.

The next time some of the wedding guests thought to wonder where Harry and Ginny had gotten to, Ron and Hermione went to find them. "Harry? Ginny?" Hermione called. Then Ron stopped, and stared. "What is it, Ron? Oh!" Hermione stopped, too.

"Well," said Ron, looking at the two abandoned folding chairs in the middle of the grass, and the kissing couple on the ground a little ways beyond them. "Hermione, do you remember that grass-stain-removing spell we learned last year?"

"Of course I do, Ronald," said Hermione. "Honestly, after all the times we've used it this week!" And she pulled her wand from the sash of her dress robes.


End file.
